In the wake of increasing disillusion with the potential of alternative online media for
providing social movements with a virtual space for self-representation and visibility
(Atton, 2002; Downing, 2001; Rodriguez, 2001) activists have been adopting online
social media into their media practices. With their popular appeal and multimodal
affordances social media such as YouTube and Facebook have reinvigorated hopes for
the potential of the internet for providing social movements such as the Global Justice
Movement, which is often misrepresented as a homogeneous and in a negative light in
the mass media (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993; Juris, 2008), with new possibilities for
promoting self-representations to wider publics – beyond the echo chambers of
alternative media (Cammaerts, 2007; Sunstein, 2001). In the mediation of institutional
politics the increasing use of popular online spaces has brought about the term
’YouTube‐ification of Politics’ (Turnsek and Jankowski, 2008). However, two challenges
remain: the first relates to fragmentation – the internet’s properties as a ‘pull-medium’
is argued to merely connect likeminded users (Cammaerts, 2007: 138). The second
relates to ’lazy politics’ – the internet’s ephemeral properties are argued to facilitate
brief participation in single-issue campaigns that fails to foster political engagement
(Fenton, 2008a: 52). This thesis focuses on the latter. It addresses the possibilities of
popular online spaces for fostering collective solidarity and political engagement in
social movement organisations. It explores how these possibilities are played out in
the online arena of popular sites employed by the two London-based social movement
organisations: the World Development Movement (WDM) and War on Want. Drawing on the cases of WDM and War on Want, the thesis addresses three
dimensions of these practices, exploring (1) rationales for using popular online spaces
to promote the SMO agenda; (2) the social movement organisations’ online
campaigns; and (3) members’ identifications with the campaigns through discourse
analysis and interviews with SMO directors, campaign, outreach and web officers as
well as SMO members. It is by analysing how SMOs use different online spaces as
locations for strategic framing and the formation of political identities that we can begin to study how the internet may contribute to an agonistic public sphere where
also voices of dissent are heard.
The thesis is based on Mouffe’s understanding of politics and the political as grounded
in discourse but also based on a view of political engagement as conflictual, affective
and sometimes irrational (Cammaerts, 2007; Fenton, 2009; Mouffe, 2005). Even
though this does not mean that SMOs do not apply rational considerations in planning
their strategic agendas for public visibility and legitimacy, it does mean that the study
of these considerations need to take into account this dual character of political
discourse as both rational and affective (Hajer and Versteeg, 2005). Therefore, we
need to consider instrumental and affective issues to understand the relationship
between strategic protest and the underlying dynamics of intragroup commitment
(Griggs and Howarth, 2002; Snow et al., 1986) – the interconnections between strategy
and identity, external resonance and internal commitment. In this way, the democratic
potentialities of the internet can be seen as not only related to the ways in which
SMOs communicate their agenda but also to potentialities for forging political
identities and commitment (Fenton, 2008a).